Friday, Jul 25, 2008
How hard is it fly an airliner? And why can't I keep my tray table down during takeoff?
Aug 23, 2002 | Some people still aren't buying my bit about the low salaries of many airline pilots. I was ready to share my older W-2s with anyone who doubted me, but now I'm unsure if I'm willing to so embarrass myself.
Maybe it was that fellow on C-SPAN recently who shamed us spoiled airline pilots for, according to him, making $300,000 a year and working 65 hours a month. In reality, a pilot works 65 hours a month the way a football player works an hour each week. Not counted in that total are the many hours between flights, the nights laying over in distant hotels, and so forth. Meanwhile the number of pilots making salaries over $200,000 is a very small fraction of an airline's roster -- a list, in the case of giants like United and American, that includes some ten thousand names. Those at the very top, however, are handy ammunition for management during labor negotiations and tough economic times. Ironically, however, most pilots furloughed after last September, yours truly among them, are those with the least seniority, earning around $30,000 (or less in the case of the regional carriers).
When it's all said and done, the business of flying planes is a blue-collar job, much as pilots are loath to admit it. We are sometimes so defensive about what it means, or doesn't mean, to be a professional, that our pride comes across like some quivering self-help mantra. But a blue collar, in and of itself, in no way precludes the true tenets of things "professional," and it isn't something a pilot, or anyone else, needs to be insecure about. Regardless of collar color, we're in no way off the hook as far as needing to maintain the highest standards, and a job with a major carrier (a position that in my case took 16 years to achieve), at least when the ink is running black and people aren't crashing planes into buildings, is a good one.
What sort of qualitative and quantitative differences are at hand when operating an airliner versus a typical single-engine private plane? One often hears amazement that the WTC attacks were carried out by pilots with such limited experience.
It depends what you mean by "operate." Certain individuals showed us -- and not to this pilot's surprise -- that basic flying skills, transferable from light Cessna to jet-powered wide-body, are enough to drive an already airborne 767 on target into a skyscraper. But landing that airplane, or operating its various systems or navigating it across great distances, would be a different story.
The importance of a hands-on "feel" for flying (and yes, some pilots are better than others in the innate talent department) versus that of the acquired knowledge of the vastly technical workings of airplanes, is something we can debate, but a certain proficiency in both is required. Climbing, descending, and turning are nothing a student pilot couldn't handle at the helm of a Boeing, but at the same time one glance at its computerized flight deck is a serious dose of technological intimidation. You'll notice certain similarities even to a World War I biplane -- all of them overwhelmed by some pretty complex instrumentation. A working knowledge of all those buttons, dials, and keypads becomes more crucial with the breadth of the task at hand. Is the weather less than perfect? Are we handling a problem? Are we landing? Managing a flight (and "managing" is such the right word) is so much more than hands-on flying. Messing with gravity is the easy part.
Could a private pilot land an airliner in good weather? Maybe. It depends. But he or she would have no idea how to handle the various onboard systems. Could somebody with no flying experience do either of these things? Never.
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